The company isn’t disclosing how much extra funding they’re getting from these four, but it’s definitely not “angel-sized,” co-founder D. Scott Phoenix tells us. (I also can’t really think of a time when this many CEOs and founders of this stature got together to personally fund a company.)

Vicarious is working on the next generation of artificial intelligence technology. Phoenix said that the AI field is still centered around convolutional neural network technology that was developed back in the 1980s.

But by more closely mimicking how the brain works, Phoenix and his neuroscientist co-founder Dileep George say that they’ve been able to make breakthroughs in performance and speed. Last fall, they showed off a way to solve Captcha queries.

They’re hoping that Vicarious’ technology will eventually lead to the world’s first intelligent machines.

The company is still incredibly small at this point, with more than $56 million raised for a headcount of 10 employees (which sounds crazy). But Phoenix said they’re planning to ramp up headcount dramatically.

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CrunchBase

OverviewComputers are currently unable to understand the sensory experience of a human. Sense data is almost always noisy, blurry, occluded, and an ultimately incomplete 2D snapshot of a 3D world. For the past three decades, these uncertainties have foiled our best efforts to create automated systems for understanding the world as we experience it.
However, there is one type of system that handles these problems …